on the fifth floor of the Hotel Lux (there was a telephone in the corridor, which no-one, for fear that it might be the NKVD police, dared to answer; it was part of the sinister surrealism of the place that when he did eventually answer an insistent ringing, someone asked him about a Polish Communist writing on Africa). Berman then cultivated the obviously up-and-coming Soviet officials Nikita Khrushchev, in the western Ukraine, and Boris Ponomarev, in Byelorussia, who was to be head of the International Department of the Central Committee, the successor to the Comintern. As the Red Army moved forward, Berman was one of the very few Poles whom Stalin trusted, and in Warsaw he took over the Security Service, the UB, with its networks everywhere, and he was a main architect of the new regime, arranging for the persecution and silencing of opponents. In case such men might let him down, Stalin would be a constant presence, even telephoning at midnight to catch them off their guard. But there were figures ostensibly less sinister than Berman. The press chief, Stefan Staszewski, had had a terrible history. Born in 1906, son of a Jewish small tradesman, he became a law student, joined the Communist Party, went to the Comintern school in Moscow for three years, and then served as youth secretary in south-east Poland, where the Party tried for an alliance with Ukrainian nationalists. He was arrested, fled to the USSR in 1934, and was sentenced there to eight years in a camp, in the terrible frozen Kolyma. A brother was murdered in the USSR; his mother was murdered at Treblinka. A man such as Staszewski only really had the Party as a mental and emotional focus, and in 1948 he was its press chief. Or there was Roman Werfel, socially above Staszewski, in that his father was a prosperous lawyer in the chief city of the south-east, Lwow, when it was one of the great places of the Austrian empire. There was a portrait of the Emperor on the wall and the family spoke German at home. Roman — like so many other boys of this class — despised religion, ate ham sandwiches at school, and was beaten up by other Jewish pupils. Then it was Vienna and Communism, followed by Berlin and a return to Poland, where he organized strikes on the noble Sapieha family estate at Rawa Ruska, where the peasants were generally Ukrainian. In 1939 he escaped to the Soviet zone, and joined up with the Moscow Communists as head of the ideological section. As such, he came to run much of the educational and cultural side of Polish Communism, but he was very erudite, and he did use his influence to help people who, in, say, Prague, would have been cleaning boilers. There were others who followed the Stalinist line and who were as much its captives as its advocates, and their loss of office later on probably came as a relief. Of the people the journalist spoke to, the only unrepentant figure was Julia Minc, widow of the one-time economic chief. Her past was part prison (for membership of Communist Youth, in 1922), part France, part Samarkand, where her husband, during the war, taught economics. Her interview with the journalist was pure agitprop, delivered with contempt, and when the journalist demurred, she told the dog to bite her.
In 1945 and 1946 the Communists entrenched themselves, working out how to take power. In the summer of 1946 the matter became urgent. The failure of the Council of Foreign Ministers to agree as to Germany’s future was followed, that September, by the speech of James F. Byrnes in Stuttgart, to the effect that a German state in the west was under examination; Bizonia had already been announced, and its economic council was to be the nucleus of a West German government. Poland, in her strategic position, was then taken over by Stalin. It was important to discredit the non-Communists in Western eyes, and of course old Poland could be caricatured as a place of great estates and downtrodden peasants. There was some truth in this, but not much: the country had made considerable but unsung progress between the wars. Anti-semitism could also be used to discredit the anti- Communists, and there were indeed murderous clashes as Jews returned, trying to recover their property. The Cardinal Prince Sapieha himself was tactless, saying after an incident in the summer of 1946 that there were too many Jews in a government ‘the nation does not wish’. In saying this he was only echoing a widespread peasant opinion that
The Communists mobilized their supporters, awarding them lands and houses evacuated by the three million Germans in 1945-6, whether in Silesia, Pomerania or southern East Prussia, and by April 1946 were being pressed by the Western ambassadors for proper elections. These could be postponed for a time, with reference to the endless movement of people, but not for ever; they needed preparation. In June there was a dress rehearsal — a referendum, containing three questions inviting the answer ‘yes’ (e.g. whether to approve of the new western borders). That allowed a drawing up of electoral lists, and a noting down of who was who. The next stage was to gain the alliance of left-wing elements outside the Party, much as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917, with the Left of the Socialist Revolutionaries. The Communists took over the trade unions, with endless detailed manoeuvering in committees where the agenda was ‘fixed’ by a Communist nominee. That way, ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ could be deployed against any independent voice. Besides, the Communists allocated land and housing, and could therefore arrange for whole blocks and factories to vote in unison. ‘Anti-Fascism’ was a weapon to use against opposition, and a dissident party was simply outlawed; with some left-wing socialist help a new electoral law was passed in September. Another scheme was to establish dummy parties, pretending to be properly Catholic or Liberal or Peasant; the real ones could then, again, be outlawed; and opposition media could be silenced. There were even some supposedly realistic Catholics, such as the journalist Stefan Kisielewski, who called for a Catholic bloc acceptable to both sides. When the election occurred, ‘List Three’, ‘the Democratic bloc’, won 80 per cent of the vote with 90 per cent participation, whole factories and housing blocks voting together: there had been 15,000 arrests and 10 per cent of the opposition (PSL) offices were simply closed. The non-Communist ministers, still theoretically in charge of their second- and third-rank ministries, found their telephones disconnected and their secretaries sabotaging correspondence. The Western embassies collected tales of all this and protested, but the Communists could weasel out. When the parliament met, in January 1947, with its handful of real opposition deputies, these behaved bravely, but, fearing for their lives, fled abroad.
In Germany, Soviet policy somewhat varied. On the one side were demands for reparations, and much of industry in the Soviet zone was dismantled. But on the other, the zone was supposed to be an advertisement for socialism, or, at the very least, to show that a neutral, unified Germany would have nothing to fear from Moscow, somewhat in the manner of Finland. In 1945 revenge was the dominant note. All along there had been friction in the German capital. Almost as soon as they occupied the city, the Russians had flown in old German Communists from Moscow, with an idea of controlling their zone through apparently democratic methods. To start with, the Communists announced that they would co-operate with other anti-Fascist parties and not insist on a full-scale Communist programme. They would, for instance, have a land reform, but one designed to break up the estates of the ‘reactionaries’ and grant land to small farmers (who were expected, as in Poland or the Czech lands, then to support the Communists). But elections did not go their way — hardly surprisingly, since at the time the Red Army had acquired a terrible reputation for looting and raping, and a quarter of the industrial installations of the zone were being dismantled. When free elections were held in Austria and Hungary (November 1945) the Communists did badly, and in Hungary had to be given an artificially powerful place in the government (controlling the police). One solution would be to force the Social Democratic Party (SDP) (and the trade unions) into a Communist framework — a united workers’ party — and to muzzle any other parties. That last was easy enough, and the leaders (of the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Democrats) were just expelled, while dummies took their places. No more opposition from that quarter. The Social Democrats, collecting roughly two thirds of the vote, were more difficult, and the picture was complicated. Most Social Democrats were not unsympathetic at least to co- operation with the Communists. They regarded the recent German past with horror, some had spent time in concentration camps, and almost all felt that the failure of the two working-class parties to collaborate against Hitler had been a main cause of the Nazi catastrophe. In some cases, there was an idea that the Soviet Union alone offered a real chance that Germany could be a united, democratic and neutral country, like an enormous version of Finland, and maybe there would be concessions as to the border with Poland. Gustav Dahrendorf, who had been a member of the Reichstag before Hitler came to power, dallied with such ideas in 1945 and early in 1946. But the Communists behaved in a devious and bullying way, repellent to democrats, and they also resorted to force, kidnapping opposition figures. Meanwhile, they activated a form of the Nazi system of local control. Under the Nazis, each block of flats had its political supervisor, who snooped and bullied. The Communists reintroduced the system. When it came to political or trade union meetings, they were also skilled at the tactics employed by revolutionary minorities throughout history: ‘packing’ key committees with their own place-men, putting essential details into the small print, preventing opponents from attending meetings, deploying boring and lengthy speeches as a way of emptying a hall of moderate opponents and then taking a snap vote, provided they had the chairman in their pocket. In that way the trade union elections in Berlin produced a Communist majority (just as had happened in Russia, with the Soviets, in the later months of 1917). In any case, there was the Soviet military presence, as a great threat: the Social Democrats were forced to hold all meetings jointly with the Communists, Russian officers in plain
